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Schwanengesang, D957 Part 1

Introduction

The commentary on the song Auf dem Strom discusses how deep was Schubert’s link with Beethoven in the last year of his life. It is curious, but understandable, that he seems to have been more engaged with thoughts of this composer and his music after Beethoven’s death than before it: the remark ascribed to him – ‘Who can do anything after Beethoven?’ – dates from much earlier, and in 1828 Schubert was setting about answering his own question. He was concerned to exorcise the ghost of his great contemporary, the better to move on and occupy his natural place as Vienna’s leading composer, and homage seemed the best way to pay his dues once and for all, even if that homage was accomplished with, as Walter Dürr says, ‘typically Schubertian reserve’. If it is true that he received Rellstab’s poems from Beethoven Nachlass via Anton Schindler, we have never been told how many poems were passed to him, and why he chose to set the one he did. The suitability of Auf dem Strom for a concert given on the first anniversary of Beethoven’s death has already been discussed. But when he came to plan another group of songs on these Rellstab poems, what thoughts guided his choice? He had already composed two highly integrated cycles. Deutsch suggested that he probably wanted to avoid composing another work with a connecting narrative because of a hitherto supportive critic’s unfavourable response to Winterreise (‘true song should unfold itself in single flowers’); whatever Franz Stoepel of Munich wrote, it would in any case have been impossible to cap Winterreise. In 1818 he had composed something of a riposte to Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte, the song-cantata Einsamkeit to the words of Mayrhofer. Like the Beethoven cycle this consisted of six linked sections, a garland of songs by a single poet on a single theme. What Schubert had not yet done, however, was to marry the best of both worlds: to write a cycle of separate free-standing songs united not by a story but by a theme flexible enough to be give unity in diversity. Such a cycle could use the idea of the distant beloved in various guises as a way of paying tribute to Beethoven.

Over every song in Schwanengesang hovers the presence of a different distant beloved. In Liebesbotschaft and In der Ferne the lover sends messages to her by water and on the breeze; in Kriegers Ahnung the soldier bids his distant spouse or lover farewell (he is about to die in battle), and in Ständchen the serenader is separated from the object of his affection and never permitted to scale the balcony; Frühlingssehnsucht links longing for the advent of spring with a hopeless desire for the presence of the loved one; Aufenthalt is awash with the tears born of loveless sorrow, and Abschied, however seemingly merry, is a song of parting which bids love farewell before a journey. (Even the darkest symphonic work must have its scherzo.) The other possible Rellstab scherzo, Lebensmut is the only song which could not, in any conceivable way, be made to fit into such an anthology. Was it abandoned for this reason?

Whether by chance or planning this ‘ferne Geliebte’ theme continues into the Heine cycle: Der Atlas is someone who has gambled on love and lost; Ihr Bild, Die Stadt and Der Doppelgänger similarly describe the loss of love and measure the terrible distance between estranged lovers – in the last case a visit to her house occasions a premonition of death. Am Meer describes memories of a terrible parting, and even Das Fischermädchen is about love on the rebound, a search for a fleeting substitute for the love that has been lost back home. The ‘theme’ may even be extended into the song that was placed at the end of the cycle by the publisher Haslinger: the owner of the carrier pigeon in Die Taubenpost sends love out in terms of longing but receives nothing back. Throughout this sequence ‘she’ is absent, unable to respond even if able to listen, as in Ständchen; she is separated by distance, the impenetrable wall of a house, convention, even death perhaps, but she is not there. In four songs the lover is referred to in the third person; in one (Kriegers Ahnung) she is referred to as ‘she’, and is addressed directly at the end of the song; in six songs the singer addresses the lover as ‘du’, but only in two, Abschied and Das Fischermädchen, can we sense the possibility of a colloquy. If there were a single title which might cover the theme of these songs it might be An die ferne Geliebte. And if it were true that Schubert was still in love with Karoline Esterhazy, and felt (correctly) that he would never be able to aspire to her hand, the shared experience of unattainable love would have been another link he could claim with his great predecessor via the title of a song-cycle.

Recordings

The Dutch bass-baritone Robert Holl is one of the great Lieder singers of our time. In his first recording for Hyperion, he brings his tremendous artistry to Schubert’s last song-cycle. Schwanengesang contains some of Schubert’s greatest works ...» More

'This would have been a massive project for even the biggest international label, but from a small independent … it is a miracle. An ideal Christ ...'Please give me the complete Hyperion Schubert songs set – all 40 discs –and, in the next life, I promise I'll "re-gift" it to Schubert himself … ...» More

'Ainsley interprets his songs with the tonal beauty, fine-grained phrasing and care for words that are the hallmarks of his appreciable art … all ...'A glorious conclusion to this magisterial edition … a magnificent project … one of the great achievements of recording history' (BBC Music ...» More

This music reflects perfection in its watery surface – a classical perfection in a pastoral frame, which is appropriate for Beethoven and the provenance of the Rellstab poems which possibly came directly from that master’s desk. The intense subjective whimsy of Die schöne Müllerin and the tragic melancholy of Winterreise are more important milestones in the history of the romantic style, but no matter – it was very much Schubert’s own decision to differentiate the manner of these songs from those of their predecessors. Einstein remarks that Liebesbotschaft was written as a result of ‘a new emphasis which transforms the song into a recital piece’. Does he mean by this that a song with neither narrative context nor characters with names or roles, becomes something nearer to chamber music? Although Liebesbotschaft is in the same key of G major as Wohin?, the Rellstab stream, also pressed into service as love’s messenger, is several degrees cooler than Müller’s, and inhabited neither by water nixies nor the spirit of German folksong. If anything the mood here is nearer the G major coda of Eifersucht und Stolz from the same cycle where the miller-boy imagines himself playing pretty songs and dances to children on a reed pipe, a pastoral idyll which is a fabrication unrelated to his real story. But at least we have followed that story with growing empathy. As much as we adore the music of Liebesbotschaft, the narrator and his gardening paramour are stock characters, a slightly updated Damon and Chloë. Once the song is over they cease to live in our imagination or concern.

In exchange for this lack of interest in the song’s background, at least as far as the poetry is concerned, we find a foreground of melting beauty and elegance. Schubert is able to take any character, however wooden, and breathe life into it; thus the narrator emerges, if not as a Sturm und Drang lover, as someone courtly and affectionate, a Lieder-singing Don Ottavio. But Rellstab has given Schubert all the help he initially needs by giving him a stream – the last in which our composer was to set foot – which is described as murmuring, silver and bright; with this as his inspiration Schubert works his miracle, and he begins by introducing the movement of the stream in the piano. It is difficult to believe that the whole song did not derive from the introduction – as flawless a four bars as the composer ever wrote – but the sketch, one of the few we possess for a major Schubert song, tells us otherwise. He is often parsimonious with his music paper, but here, for once, he is extravagant. He plans his songs on three staves and concerns himself only with the vocal line, leaving large white gaps for the piano part – on a map, after all, these empty spaces would signify water! Of the accompaniment he only sketches a desultory six bars scattered in groups of two throughout the piece, and even these are as bare as a skeleton, as if an aide-memoire for something he already has in his head. The voice part on the other hand is already perfectly formed, scarcely different from the final version – a melody which seems to have been conceived on the spot and without revision. The composer bothers to write the word underlay for only two-and-a-half lines of poetry, but it is clear that he is working with the poet’s poem by his side. If we were only allowed to glimpse this scene it would tell us much: if Schubert were consulting a handwritten piece of paper it would confirm that he was using copies of the poem prepared by Rellstab for Beethoven in 1825; if it were a book we would know that Schindler’s claims to have given Schubert the poems were false and that the composer was using the published edition of Rellstab’s poems from 1827.

The priorities of this sketch are clear. Here is proof that Schubert regarded song-writing as tune first and foremost; the melody had to be right before anything else. In this sketch, however, he leaves an entire three-line stave blank before beginning the vocal line – a sign that he planned a substantial introduction. What he eventually wrote when filling in this space is unique in his songs. The first seeming anomaly is the use of the words ‘Ziemlich langsam’ (rather slow) for music that bristles with demisemiquaver figurations – a black thicket which usually signifies virtuosic speed, particularly in romantic music. This marking led the soprano Elena Gerhardt (1883-1961) to make Gerald Moore play the introduction at a snail’s pace, but anyone aware of eighteenth-century practices would know that in this 2/4 it is the crotchet which is meant to be taken as the ‘rather slow’ beat (no matter how many smaller notes are made to fit into the larger unit), and that the ‘slow’ marking does not refer to how the music should sound, as much as how it is measured. This is only one of many instances where Schubert, himself born in the eighteenth century, reveals himself as Salieri’s pupil. We have only to turn to the songs of Beethoven to find demisemiquavers, and the seemingly contradictory marking ‘Andante vivace’ in the Metastasio setting Lebensgenuss (Op 82 No 5); the famous Wonne der Wehmut (Goethe, Op 83 No 1) is also in 2/4 and marked ‘Andante espressivo’ – generations of singers have slowed this piece down into four beats in a bar and have made the accompanying demisemiquavers sound lugubrious. They were meant to flow without sounding hasty or snatched, and so it is with the opening of Liebesbotschaft.

This musicological point is worth making because it is one of the things which establishes the song’s classical poise within its adventurousness – a typically Schubertian compromise between the old and the new, between humility and initiative, between giving way and forging ahead, between conservation and renewal, between the musical worlds of one composer born in 1770 and another born in 1797. Schubert honoured the past with almost every note he wrote and here was no exception, particularly as he sat down to write a work which was associated in his mind with Beethoven. On the other hand the innovation, quiet and muted thought it may be, is also staggering. Thousands of composers have given the piano an aquatic role, but even in competition with himself Schubert here achieves a high-water mark. Over a river-bed of left-hand fifths, as constant as a steady current, the stream flows imperturbably, its movement visible (and audible) in figurations rippling up the stave and down again. In more than one song from this period (e.g. Frühlingssehnsucht) the composer has been fascinated by subtle, and almost hidden, harmonic changes which occur within chord patterns in the accompaniment. So it is here, with the pianist’s fingers limning in touches of unexpected harmony which fill out the texture and make it sparkle (including that famous and unexpected G sharp at the end of bar 3 which has tripped up so many pianists!).

As soon as the voice enters with its matchless but simple melody, the piano adopts the role of the solicitous cavaliere servente. The concern of the poet for the wellbeing of his beloved is mirrored in the piano’s cradling of the voice. It supports the singer in undulations which produce euphonious sixths in combination with the vocal line, and then echoes each of the singer’s opening phrases with music that suggests the sighing of distant horn-calls – something which reinforces the underlying pastoral convention of the whole. This conversational pattern of two bars of singing followed by one bar of pianistic commentary continues throughout the poem’s first strophe. Right from the beginning the music is suffused with a tinge of melancholy – a state of mind disguised by the energy of the rippling and the enthusiasm of the singer. Nevertheless the words ‘so silbern und hell’ modulate into A minor, and ‘Ach, trautes Bächlein, mein Bote sei du’ are cast in E minor, the relative minor of the tonic key. This adds an element of rueful longing to the music, resignation as much as ardour, which contributes to its sense of deep feelings held in check. After all, Don Ottavio with his patrician reserve never lays a hand on Donna Anna.

For the second strophe the music moves sideways into the subdominant, C major. This shift makes something magical and other-worldly of the lover’s garden and her flowers which spring into life thanks to mezzo staccato quavers in the pianist’s left hand. (The word ‘gepflegt’ suggests work in the garden, as if the gentle digging of the piano’s semiquavers might be done with a trowel.) The narrator cannot see this pastoral retreat from his vantage point upstream, but that leaves him (and us) free to make something Elysian of it in our minds. Schumann could not have painted more of an enchanted bower than this – one is reminded of the hushed ‘Sei unser Schwester nicht böse’ in Am leuchtenden Sommermorgen from Dichterliebe. Mention of roses prompts Schubert, who has written his fair share of flower songs, to perfumed eloquence: the last two lines of the strophe are set twice, and both times the word ‘Rosen’ produces a leap of a fifth, the second a third higher than the first. It is as if the singer has suddenly become intoxicated with the fragrances of a summer evening. The passionate setting of ‘purpurner Glut’ produces a wonderful sighing fall on ‘Glut’, but even this glowing image is described with a shift into a wilting D minor. We realise that the singer is separated from the fulfilment of his dream; he is not in the garden, but only able to dream about surrendering to the aroma of the flowers worn on the beloved’s breast.

The third strophe is introduced by an interlude where two bars alternate between G7 and C major with a tiny left-hand motif – gentle yearning semiquavers that had been included, albeit notated in the treble clef, in the song’s sketch discussed above. As soon as the singer enters the music sinks into A minor – E minor – G minor for ‘Wenn sie am Ufer, in Träume versenkt’, an exquisitely doleful progression, each chord change sinking deeper into slumber. The speed of the vocal line has exactly halved (crotchets and quavers rather than quavers and semiquavers), a wonderful use of musical augmentation to depict sleep and dreams (in the voice part only – the stream murmurs on in the same pulse). The second line of this verse (‘Meiner gedenkend, das Köpfchen hängt’) is set to music a third lower in pitch than the first – one of the composer’s loveliest sequences, and absolutely descriptive of the words. When quick note values return to the vocal line (‘Tröste die Süsse mit freundlichem Blick’) semiquavers nudge up the stave as if on a quest – searching and scanning for the sight of a familiar face. The repetition of these words sounds a note of desperation, always hidden by the classical poise which makes some people, including Capell, think of this song as ‘amiable’ and ‘placid’; the stream is at its most ruffled here with frequent changes of harmony, a turbulence which suggests that the re-uniting of these lovers will be no easy or simple thing. The phrase ‘kehrt bald zurück’ (‘will soon return’) plays a special role here (the same word ‘zurück’ has pulled the vocal line away from modulation in the first strophe of Auf dem Strom): it is sung to a cadence which moves into B major but it prompts one of the composer’s most magical returns to the home key, a musical pun on the meaning of ‘zurück’ which prompts tears rather than laughter – the little group of semiquaver octaves in the left hand which paves the way back to G major (the only such tremor from the river-bed in the entire song) sets up to perfection this heartbreakingly beautiful cadence.

The last verse is virtually a repeat of the first – the song’s form is ABCA – and it is a triumph of strophic management. All the inflections of the new words are just as appropriately set – as if the music had been minted freshly for them. Thus the withdrawal into E minor for ‘Flüstre ihr Träume der Liebe zu’ suggests the intimacy of lovers’ secrets, and the leap of a tenth on ‘Träume’ (‘Grüsse’ in the equivalent passage in the first verse) is a magical thing, a gift to a singer in command of his mezza voce. The coda passage is a repeat of the poem’s final line, and for this the music moves into C major. Although this is not really a surprise (the music for the second strophe had also begun in this way) the subdominant is a magical and intimate locale for the words ‘Flüstre ihr Träume’ – it suggests the exchange of almost sacred confidences. The final descending melisma on dotted rhythms for ‘Liebe’ is as affecting as a deeply sincere bow of homage.

The postlude is an elaboration of the prelude and brings the music full circle – an absolutely perfect circle drawn freehand by a great master. If the song seems, at one level, framed by an old-fashioned pastoral convention – something contrived in comparison to the spontaneity of almost any song in Winterreise – we have to remember that some of the greatest works of art have been accomplished within the conventions of artificiality. Yes, we may notice the difference, but we still love this music very much, and would not be without it for the world.

Murmuring brooklet,
So silver and bright,
Do you hasten,
So lively and swift, to my beloved?
Ah, sweet brooklet,
Be my messenger.
Bring her greetings
From her distant lover.

All the flowers,
Tended in her garden,
Which she wears
So charmingly on her breast,
And her roses
With their crimson glow:
Refresh them, brooklet,
With your cooling waters.

When on your banks
She inclines her head
Lost in dreams,
Thinking of me,
Comfort my sweetheart
With a kindly glance,
For her beloved
Will soon return.

When the sun sinks
In a red flush,
Lull my sweetheart
To sleep.
With soft murmurings
Bring her sweet repose,
And whisper
Dreams of love.

English: Richard Wigmore

Liebesbotschaft is the essence of Sehnsucht, already audible in the gentle rise and fall of the piano introduction, and in the constantly rising inflections of the vocal line, which stretches to the interval of a tenth for the final line of the first and last stanzas (on the words ‘Grüße’ and ‘Träume’ respectively), this very interval perhaps also serving as a metaphor for the distance that separates the two lovers. Outwardly conventional, with its rippling water and charming left-hand echoes in the piano part, the song is a masterpiece of construction, with an inspired chain of descending modulations as the singer imagines his beloved bowing her head in thought, and a correspondingly animated rising sequence to depict his imminent return.

Schubert, the composer of the famous Marches militaires, grew up with a background of war; his home city was the host of the Congress whose task it was to redraw the map of Europe in the wake of Napoleon. Austria was caught up in these conflicts during his childhood, and the composer’s first song masterpiece, Gretchen am Spinnrade, dates from the very week in which the Emperor’s victory over the French forces was marked with Vienna’s biggest triumphal celebration. One of his most admired poets, Theodor Körner, had died in this war of liberation; for a number of years in the composer’s adolescence the streets of Vienna must have been full of returning soldiers. In the Schubert song canon there is fighting aplenty from a number of historical epochs and locales: noble Ossianic warriors fighting the Romans; bloodthirsty ballads and songs of noble knights and ladies; battle- and drinking-songs, often for male chorus, including one inspired by Wallenstein and the Thirty Years’ War; and of course songs like Körner’s Gebet während der Schlacht where the battle-poem dates from the composer’s own lifetime. There is a also a letter written from Schubert’s long holiday in Upper Austria in 1825 where, on visiting a site on the bloody massacre of the Bavarians by the Tyrolese in 1809, he expresses a profound distaste for the horrors of war, particularly conflicts associated with religion. Nevertheless, the composer’s interest in soldiery (he himself was too short for military service) seems to have focused on the Crusades: the opera Fierabras is the biggest work on this theme, but such songs as the Richard the Lionheart’s Romanze from Scott’s Ivanhoe, Der Kreuzzug, and the unfinished opera Der Graf von Gleichen show a continuing fascination with this epoch.

The soldier in Kriegers Ahnung is without a background. He might be a crusader, or he might be fighting in a contemporary setting, but there is a gravity about him, even as he faces certain death, which suggests the nobility of a knight of yore. The homesickness of every serving solider, and memories of happier times, are combined with his foreboding that he will soon have to pay the ultimate price as a warrior and patriot and give up his life for his country. The song is a prophecy of Gustav Mahler’s obsession with soldiers’ songs and with the cruel fate of lovers described in Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen, and Revelge. Der Tambourgesell is also filled with compassion for the deserter, a small man caught up in the war machine and destroyed by it.

Curiously enough, the very opening strikes a Mahlerian note – C minor chords in 3/4 which suggest the shudder of muffled drums or even the clanking of armour. C minor is also a dramatic key for Beethoven – we have mentioned the Marcia funebre from the ‘Eroica’ in connection with Auf dem Strom, but here one is reminded of the opening of the ‘Pathétique’ Sonata, as well as the frisson of the opening of Schubert’s own Piano Sonata in C minor, D958. The song is divided into sections marked by the different verses, and the structure is unlike any other song in the Rellstab settings. This is not only Schubert’s last war-song, it represents his last essay in sectional song composition where changes of key, metre and tempo are used in preference to a single seamless structure. To an extent this is ‘old-fashioned’ Schubert, a type of song that, in formal terms at least, he would have been more likely to write ten or twelve years earlier. The celebrated Der Wanderer of 1816 comes to mind as an appropriate parallel and, as in that masterpiece, Schubert also takes his time to establish a mood of heavy foreboding before the entry of the voice.

How heavy the mood should be here is another matter. A great deal of the efficacy of the piece depends on the speed marked ‘Nicht zu langsam’. Some commentators have talked about a death march at the beginning (a curious description of music in 3/4) and this, allied with the opening words (‘In tiefer Ruh’) has encouraged performers to impossibly slow tempi allied with a Wagnerian interpretation, as if such a song could only be sung by a hoary Gurnemanz. If the composer intended this song to be sung by the same singer who has just delighted us with Liebesbotschaft – a young man in love, and not necessarily a bearded old warrior – a lighter approach is justified. (This point is especially relevant when one considers the relatively rare occurrence of a performance of this set of songs by a tenor in the original keys; of all the songs in Schwanengesang this is the only one that baritones are able to sing without transposition, and hearing them able to revel in the tessitura has accustomed us to darker, and thus older-seeming, colours.) The tempo should be a slow one-in-the-bar; this enables a good singer to encompass the opening phrase in one breath and it also gives a twitch of angst to the opening which should not be, as it so often is, merely grandly somnolent. There is an aspect of the scena here, as is almost always the case when Schubert divides a song into sections, and with this comes certain theatrical flourishes: the portentous ‘dirty work afoot’ harmonies of ‘mir ist das Herz so bang und schwer’ are taken from an earlier Schubert, and the turn which decorates ‘Sehnsucht mir so heiss’ (set almost as a free cadenza) might have been written for Vogl, enabling him to re-live, with his customary pathos, a great moment in the opera house. This first section end with a four-bar interlude where the rhythmic motif of the introduction places us firmly in the dominant.

We might expect a second verse in C minor, but instead of a V-I progression we slip a semitone upwards into the key of A flat major. This is marked by a new tempo indication (‘Etwas schneller’). As he calls here for only a moderate change of speed the composer surely did not wish the first section to be too slow. (I have heard many a performance where, crotchet for crotchet, this section is taken at about three times the speed of the opening.) The composer avoids a new key signature, perhaps in an attempt to preserve a sense of unity in the song as a whole. The music blossoms into gentle triplets, tendrils of caress and intimacy; these, together with the change of key suggests past happiness – as in Winterreise, the harshness of present in the minor key is mitigated by the beauty of major-key memories. The entwining of voice and piano in euphonious sixths at ‘An ihrem Busen warm’ and ‘Lag sie in meinem Arm’ looks back to Liebesbotschaft: the lovers’ dreamy reactions to thoughts of their paramours are remarkably similar, as are the descending harmonic sequences on the repeats of these phrases. This has led us into D flat major via a passage in the softly uxurious key of G flat; a short interlude of rocking arpeggios in D flat major in the middle of the piano gives way to a triplet on low D flats which pulsates ominously in the bass. To change the scene back to the unpleasant reality of the military camp with cinematic speed these D flats are suddenly re-spelled as acerbic C sharps. This is the pivot which moves the music for the third verse into F sharp minor.

The dark mood of Aufenthalt, a song about lonely isolation, appears here as a pre-echo, and loneliness is also the prevailing emotion. The pulsating triplets also have much in common with the panic-stricken fourth verse of Auf dem Strom which describes a one-way journey to the unknown regions of death, and also with Fahrt zum Hades. The horror of the soldier’s situation is aptly illustrated at ‘Hier fühlt die Brust sich ganz allein’ by a sudden harmonic shift from the first inversion of F sharp minor (with A as the bass note) into the root position of A minor. This bleak harmony prevails for no fewer than three bars of merciless triplets before falling a semitone to the even more dismal reaches of F minor in first inversion. From this bedrock of depression the music surges upwards, both in terms of harmony and vocal tessitura, to depict the soldier’s tears rising to the surface, as if from the deepest of hidden wells. The sob of the first ‘der Wehmut Tränen quillt’ is somewhat stifled, but the high F of ‘Wehmut’ on the repeat of these words gives full voice to his emotions.

How easily might Schubert have set the concluding verse – certainly not Rellstab at his most inspired – in a sentimental and lachrymose manner. But the composer realises that something exceptional is called for to enliven the song. Firstly, the music must be expanded to encompass all that happens rather too quickly in these short concluding lines (the battles still to be fought, the premonition of death which lies at the heart of the piece, and the soldier’s farewell). The space and power needed to express all this is achieved by various verbal repetitions as well as by another change of tempo (‘Geschwind, unruhig’) and a change of key signature. This resolves three flats into naturals – thus C major – but we are allowed to hear the this tonality only briefly at the song’s most intimate passage – the words ‘Bald ruh ich wohl’. Otherwise the section is a sea of churning accompanying sextuplets pivoting around G, the dominant of C major, as well as A minor and its dominant. Both valour and panic are suggested by this music, a considerable expressive achievement on Schubert’s part. Mention of many a battle (‘manche Schlacht’) produces a four-bar interlude of the greatest energy, as if we find ourselves in the thick of the fighting with swords whirring all around us. (Actually the pianist’s fingers are reminded most strongly of the accompaniment of Am Feierabend from Die schöne Müllerin which represents crushing of another sort – instead of metal clanking on metal, the grinding of mill-wheels, stone against stone). At this point the piano’s harmonies, like the protagonist, seem trapped in a situation where there is no resolution.

And then the power of imagination instantly switches the scene from battlefield to bedroom. This is the sort of magical moment of instantaneous release unique to the lied of which neither opera nor theatre is capable. The vocal line, suddenly hushed, emerges like a burst of starlight at the top of the stave. Supported by the purity of C major (albeit not in root position – this would have made fantasy fact) the soldier rests on the breast of the beloved and the setting of ‘Bald ruh ich wohl’ and ‘und schlafe fest’ achieve temporary repose in the middle of the maelstrom. Gentle triplets have replaced the scurrying sextuplets of the battle music and ties across the bar lines (have the words ‘ruh’ and ‘schlafe’ ever been more lingeringly and audaciously set?) manage to suspend the passage of time. That the soldier knows his fate all too well is emphasised by ‘Herzliebste, gute Nacht!’ The pathos here is that of the prisoner dreaming in the condemned cell, and Schubert has found such a perfect means of describing peace in the eye of the storm that he repeats the entire passage with some small adjustments. Actually this is no idle whim – the scale of the song and the grandeur of the events and the emotions surrounding them requires this expansive prolongation. (Schubert being Schubert, the repetition is not exact; at this stage of his life he is never lazy enough to ‘cut and paste’ an earlier piece of music; he must always re-compose it to fit its new circumstances.) We have another opportunity to experience the mezza voce magic of ‘Bald ruh ich wohl’, and the heady dreams of ‘und schlafe wohl’. As before, ‘Herzliebste – gute Nacht’ follows these words; this time it is harmonised in A flat major. This is to prepare us for a return to the music of the opening. We remember that C minor to A flat major had been the pathway (between verses 1 and 2) into the soldier’s dream-world; now A flat major to C minor in the reverse direction points the way back to reality that knows no return.

If the performers have got their tempo relationships right, the dotted crotchet of the ‘Geschwind’ tempo will more or less equal the crotchet of the Tempo I. The word ‘Herzliebste’ is set across this change of metre, but there should be no radical change of pulse. In this way Schubert ensures a smooth transition between two sections which should melt into each other without a perceptible break. As both premonitions of violence and dreams of peace melt into the background, we find ourselves once again in the military camp with drums shuddering as an ominous portent of the morrow. The final words of farewell hang in the air – a hopeless and final message to a distant beloved.

How successful is this song? As fine as it is, it misses inclusion in the list of Schubert’s indispensable masterpieces. It is touched with greatness in many ways, abounding in details that could only have come from the pen of the mature Schubert. But Capell puts his finger on the problem when he writes that ‘Schubert’s treatment is felt to be, if not perfunctory, at least exterior’. For at least part of this the poet is to blame: a convincing depiction of ‘a soldier and afeared!’ is beyond Rellstab’s powers, for he is no Shakespeare. There is something formal, something slightly contrived and theatrical, which stands between us and complete belief in this character. We need more time, and more music, to become acquainted with the torment of such a protagonist. As it is, his music moves us greatly, but he himself moves in and out of our ken too quickly for him to register as anything more substantial than a transitory phantom.

In deep repose my comrades in arms
Lie in a circle around me;
My heart is so anxious and heavy,
So ardent with longing.

How often I have dreamt sweetly
Upon her warm breast!
How cheerful the fireside glow seemed
When she lay in my arms.

Here, where the sombre glimmer of the flames,
Alas, plays only on weapons,
Here the heart feels utterly alone,
A tear of sadness wells up.

Heart, may comfort not forsake you!
Many a battle still calls.
Soon I shall rest well and sleep deeply,
Sweetest love—goodnight!

English: Richard Wigmore

Kriegers Ahnung finds Schubert in proto-Wagnerian mode, as always alive to the orchestral potential of the piano, with ominous brass-like chords conjuring up the gleam of campfire on armour. Although sectional in structure, like an operatic scena, it moves seamlessly from one stanza to the next, as in the lulling triplets of ‘Wie hab’ ich oft’ that become the warlike undertone of ‘Hier, wo der Flammen düstrer Schein’, and in the disillusioned return to the opening mood, where he recognizes that he will never see his beloved again.

Whispering breezes, blowing so gently,
exuding the fragrance of flowers,
how blissful to me is your welcoming breath!
What have you done to my beating heart?
It yearns to follow you on your airy path.
Where to?

Sparkling gold of the welcoming sun,
you bring the fair joy of hope.
How your happy, welcoming countenance refreshes me!
It smiles so benignly in the deep blue sky
and yet has filled my eyes with tears.
Why?

The woods and hills are wreathed in green.
Snowy blossom shimmers and gleams.
All things strain towards the bridal light;
seeds swell, buds burst;
they have found what they lacked:
and you?

Restless longing, yearning heart,
are there always only tears, complaints and pain?
I too am aware of swelling impulses!
Who at last will still my urgent desire?
Only you can free the spring in my heart,
only you!

The sketch for Liebesbotschaft had been a ‘hole in one’ from the point of view of the vocal line at least: what we see as Schubert’s first thoughts have become the song more or less as we know and love it. The sketch for Frühlingssehnsucht, however (which Richard Capell in pp. 248/249 of Schubert’s Songs confuses with the one for Liebesbotschaft) is of completely unfamiliar music: a wafting melody in D major with a time signature of 9/8 – very much in the mood and metre of the Leitner setting Wolke und Quelle from 1827. After five bars the composer changes into common time with a gently chugging melody for ‘Wie haucht ihr mich wonnig begrüssend an!’ He breaks off this sketch just before the greatest problem in the song – how to set the rhetorical ‘Wohin?’. It is just as well that Schubert abandoned these first ideas: one has already sensed that the awkward gear change between 9/8 and 4/4 is unworkable. This leisurely music was discarded in favour of the celebrated 2/4 moto perpetuo in B flat major. Whether the composition of another contemporary spring song (Bei dir allein!) played a part in the re-casting of this setting has already been discussed.

In Liebesbotschaft water has been the medium through which the lover has sent messages to the distant inamorata; although water features in the second verse of Frühlingssehnsucht the poem begins with whispering breezes. Once he had decided to compose essentially a strophic song the composer had to find an accompaniment that would do for these, as well as for babbling brooks (verse 2), glinting sunlight (verse 3), bursting buds (verse 4) and restless longing (verse 5). From that point of view these all-purpose triplets work triumphantly well. The common denominator of all these images is energy combined with delicacy; at the correct tempo the piano writing makes a whirlwind effect that does not preclude a swiftly woven filigree of harmonic detail. The vocal line is cast in Schubert’s favourite dactylic rhythm. The interaction of this duple metre with the unceasing triplets of the accompaniment further energises the song’s texture. The composer favours dactyls to depict the workings of nature – indeed for anything, including the advent of death (Der Tod und das Mädchen), which is beyond man’s control. A dactylic song like Die Sterne is a humming dynamo of electric energy; the march of spring in Trockne Blumen (Die schöne Müllerin) an implacable cortege. In Frühlingssehnsucht there is also no stopping the stirrings of nature on all sides. This makes the freeze-frame effect on the various questioning words which end each strophe especially arresting.

The twelve-bar Vorspiel is a masterful depiction of mounting excitement and rising sap. For two bars we hear only pulsating triplets in B flat major; in the third bar the bare B flats in the bass stave are adorned, like sprouting buds on a trellis, with a rising line in an inner voice – the tenor line of the accompaniment; this sets up a euphonious colloquy with the alto line in the pianist’s right hand which, in turn, nudges the soprano line up the stave as the chords become louder and fuller. For a moment, before the decrescendo which prepares us for the entrance of the voice, we experience in these triplets the exultant frisson of vernal triumph. (The only other spring song introduction that can offer a comparable build-up is L’hiver a cessé from Fauré’s La bonne chanson.) Once the singer enters, the vocal line is supported in the bass line with chords which move in sequences of thirds, fifths and sixths – horn-calls which underline the outdoor nature of the song, and which are typical of the pastoral frame which characterises Liebesbotschaft. The conversational nature of these horn-calls when heard as interludes (for example the two-bar phrase after ‘Blümiger Düfte atmend erfüllt!’) also harks back to bars 8 and 11 of that song and reminds us that Schubert may have originally intended Frühlingssehnsucht to be the second in the Rellstab cycle. (The sequence of the sketches implies this at any rate.)

As the strophe progresses the music achieves a passionate sweep, very different, for instance, from the gentle swaying of the Pollak setting Frühlingslied from 1827; in some ways this is a Rastlose Liebe soundalike. The prevailing B flat major moves up to C minor and a cadence in A flat major – a moment’s respite for the singer at ‘Herzen getan?’ as a fermata brings the accompaniment to a brief pause. Then as the music slips back into B flat major for ‘Es möchte euch folgen’, the vocal line is supported with a new rhythmic vigour, a dotted quaver/semiquaver figure which sounds a seasonal fanfare beneath the singer’s passionate outpourings. At a repeat of these words the music moves into D minor which adds grim determination to the idea of a journey that may be hazardous. It is then that the grand surprise comes, the song’s masterstroke. Schubert solves the problem of how to set that awkward ‘Wohin?’ by bringing the tumultuous onslaught of the song to a sudden halt. (This pause for thought is much more successful than the passage of similar introspection in the Goethe song Wilkommen und Abschied.) The singer’s Ds (on ‘luftiger Bahn’) creeps up a semiquaver to E flat on ‘Wohin?’ supported by a shift into the dark and distant key of A flat minor. The repeat of this enquiry resolves on to E flat major decorated with a pleading, and dismally bereft, F flat appoggiatura. A four-bar interlude of two groups of tied minims echoes the singer’s dismay (his loneliness and sense of isolation are illustrated, even visually, by those white and empty bars). Thus we are led back to B flat major and the (equally sudden) resumption of the moto perpetuo.

Thereafter, or at least for the next three verses, the song is strophic; all the new words fit the old music to perfection. The water imagery of the second strophe is appropriately mirrored by this accompaniment which bubbles and gurgles as easily as it whispers and blows. The elongated word at the end of the strophe is this time the rather more sinister ‘Hinab?’; the first upward inflection seems initially to be a question and then, on the downward repeat, an answer illustrating the direction of the word’s meaning (i.e. ‘Downwards? Downwards!’) As Schubert composed this passage was he reminded of Der Müller und der Bach and the suicidal miller-boy of Die schöne Müllerin? The connection between water imagery and the brook which lures young men to their graves shows that Rellstab, derivative poet that he was, had probably encountered Wilhelm Müller’s poems printed in 1824, a short while before this poem was written. At the end of the third verse ‘Warum?’ also seems ideally set; this is the culmination of a strophe where the light-fingered accompaniment has admirably reflected the glinting sun. Such brightness serves only to emphasise an inner darkness – there is the ache of tears in this music, and it becomes clear that the one thing missing in the protagonist’s life is the presence of the distant beloved. In the fourth verse the dotted rhythms are particularly suited to celebrate the successful quest of the swelling buds who have found the bridal light. We sense a wedding ceremony in the air for everyone except the singer whose forlorn repeats of ‘Und du?’ are addressed to himself. This change of thought gives rise to a final verse where the poet allows his observations of nature to give way to more subjective musings.

Self-pity dictates that the fifth verse should begin as a minore variant of the other four. There is different music for some twenty bars before we return to familiar ground at ‘Auch ich bin mir schwellender Triebe bewusst!’ Schubert first darkens the colour of this section by flattening the harmonies. He then screws the tension tighter by repeating the same words in a major key, but with a much higher tessitura – high G flats and Fs. This repetition of ‘Rastloses Sehnen! Wünschendes Herz’ is veritably heroic, worthy of an operatic tenor. The passage that classifies this song as a modified strophic setting (as opposed to a straightforward strophic one) has been short but telling. Then there is a return of the ‘triumph’ music with its dotted rhythms which we have encountered at the end of all the other verses. The final ‘Nur du!’ is addressed to the distant beloved, and there is something hopeless in this; we shall never know whether she heeds these pleas, but her compliance cannot be taken for granted. This ambivalence – the pleasure in thinking of her, the pain in her absence – is reflected in how this final ‘du’ is harmonised: a bar of E flat major is followed by one in E flat minor. ‘Nur du!’ again, and this time an F clouded by the uncertainty of F7 harmony for two bars. This last, highly unconventional as a clinching gesture, leaves the whole question of her reciprocation hanging in the air. Although the piano closes the song in a flourish of broken chords in B flat major there is no forte of triumph here: the hushed final cadence contains an ominous touch – a suggestion of E flat minor – a cold shiver of rejection passing over the surface of the music. The advantage of hindsight makes us realise that we have detected the seed of doubt everywhere in this music, and that its passion and enthusiasm have been a vain attempt to divert our attention from the central emptiness in the narrator’s life.

Whispering breezes,
Blowing so gently,
Filled with the fragrant
Breath of flowers,
How blissful to me is your welcoming breath!
What have you done to my beating heart?
It yearns to follow you on your airy path!
Where to?

Silver brooklets,
Babbling so merrily,
Cascade down
To the valley below.
Their ripples glide swiftly by!
The fields and the sky are deeply mirrored there.
Why yearning, craving senses, do you draw me
Downwards?

Sparkling gold
Of the welcoming sun,
You bring
The fair joy of hope.
How your happy, welcoming countenance refreshes me!
It smiles so benignly in the deep blue sky
And yet has filled my eyes with tears!
Why?

The woods and hills
Are wreathed in green!
Snowy blossom
Shimmers and gleams!
All things strain towards the bridal light;
Seeds swell, buds burst;
They have found what they lacked:
And you?

Restless longing,
Yearning heart,
Are there always only tears,
Complaints and pain?
I too am aware of swelling impulses!
Who at last will still my urgent desire?
Only you can free the spring in my heart,
Only you!

English: Richard Wigmore

Triplets run throughout Frühlingssehnsucht, its longing (and its frustration) expressed by impassioned rising figures in the piano introduction, and by the obsessively repeated rhythms of the voice part. Each verse ends with a question (‘Wohin?’ ‘Hinab?’ etc.) at which point the music stops and itself seems to ask ‘minor, or major?’. Significantly the final verse begins in the minor, but reverts to the major on the words ‘Nur Du!’—but it is hardly a comforting conclusion.

This is probably the most famous serenade in the world, but the cost of such fame to the music has been high. It has become so hackneyed, and such a symbol of Schubert in his Lilac Time incarnation, that one must always make a conscious effort to hear it with fresh ears. The piece has been subject to a staggering number of instrumental arrangements and one cannot help but think of Richard Tauber dressed up as Schubert and singing it to Hannerl, Haiderl or Hederl in the Dreimäderlhaus as he blinks amiably ‘durch die Brille’. (This is no disrespect to a very great singer incidentally. The entrepreneurs of the time simply capitalised on the fortuitous similarity of his build and appearance to that of the composer, and who can buck the market?) The music, usually in wordless adaptations, is still employed as one of the theme songs of Alt Wien and the easy, queasy Viennese Sehnsucht that is piped into shopping malls.

The main effect of this popular accessibility has been to make us hear in this serenade something free and easy where it is assumed that the urgent requests of the lover have a naturally happy ending. It is so much a set piece, and the melody is so enchanting, that we can forget all too easily that it is written in the minor key, and that it is full of that silver-toned melancholy (not sob-tinged sentimentality) that is rather more profound than thousands of glib, heart-on-sleeve interpretations would signify. Its vaunted similarity to Don Giovanni’s ‘Deh, vieni alla finestra’ is confined to the tonality of D – Schubert’s song An die Laute owes more to this Mozartian inspiration. The point is that the serenader of the Rellstab Ständchen is no heartless seducer, assured and convinced of success; the music is shot through with uncertainty and vulnerability, and it is this which makes it a quintessentially Schubertian creation.

We hear the serenader’s lute or guitar first – gently rocking staccato chords (the composer actually marks them ‘staccatissimo’ as if to suggest a plectrum rather than the brush of a finger) underpinned by bass minims. In a 3/4 bar this gives an important rest to the left hand on the third beat of bar, light and air to the music’s texture which is as swamped by over-use of the pedal as by glutinous instrumental adaptations. These quietly resonating lower notes are the foundation of the work’s poise and energy; in the manner of a ground bass they establish a spacious momentum, a hypnotic sway which is as responsible for the song’s popularity as its melody. After a four-bar introduction we hear the famous tune which, like other heart-stopping moments in the Rellstab songs, is made up of a falling sequence: thus the weaving melodic phrase for ‘Leise flehen’ is repeated a tone lower (except for the top note which remains a D) for ‘meine Lieder’. This is followed by the clinching two-bar cadence (V–I) of ‘Durch die Nacht zu Dir’. This part of the phrase is duly echoed by the piano; as in Liebesbotschaft and Frühlingssehnsucht the accompaniment has a conversational role which mulls over what has gone before in affectionate reiteration. The next two lines of poetry continue the long arch of the melody and include a superb opportunity for the tenor to display his mezza voce and feeling for words on the lightly touched high F of ‘stillen Hain’. The descending phrase ‘Liebchen, komm’ zu mir!’ moves into the relative major (how touching this is – we can almost feel the singer’s tenderness) and is once again echoed with an interlude. The guitar motif of the accompaniment moves into the left hand during these interpolations, and there seems no reason to assume that this is suddenly legato – the composer surely intends the plucked staccati to be heard as such throughout.

Schubert uses two of Rellstab’s strophes for each of his musical ones. Thus ‘Flüsternd schlanke Wipfel rauschen’ is the beginning of the first verse’s middle section beginning in the dominant of the home key. The return to D minor via A7 at ‘Wipfel rauschen’ allows for a touch of drama (even more appropriate for the matching passage of the next phrase – ‘Des Verräters feindlich Lauschen’) but once again it is the juxtaposition of major and minor which works its magic spell. What could be more poetic than the moon? – the switch to B flat major (VI) for ‘In des Mondes Licht’ bathes the music in the softest light. The entwining of voice and accompaniment in dreamy thirds at the repeat of these words makes something almost palpably liquid of this imagery. The volatile temperament of the singer (for there is something Italian about the very concept of a serenade) allows a forte outburst on the repeat of ‘Fürchte, Holde, nicht’. It seems the singer is prepared to die for his beloved and take on any number of treacherous interlopers. The eight-bar interlude that now follows is simply one of the great Schubertian miracles. Derived in the most subtle manner from the singer’s unfolding melody, it is the musical essence of the preceding serenade compressed into instrumental, rather than vocal, terms. This interlude, the apotheosis of the echo, is typical of the Rellstab songs; and the echo also contains an echo of itself: the minore statement of the first four bars melts into a major-key reiteration of the same material. The effect of this is indescribably wistful. This is one of those songs where we can almost feel how tenderly Schubert, if he had been given the chance, would have made love. And how seldom such chances seem to have come his way is also somehow writ large in the music.

Thus the sound of the nightingale which is the subject of both the third and fourth verses of the poem (the song’s second musical strophe) is the ‘schmelzend Ach’ of which Hölty wrote in An die Nachtigall, the ‘voix de notre désespoir’ which Verlaine immortalised in En sourdine. This is the last of the many times that this bird makes an appearance in Schubert’s songs, but perhaps the most beautiful. So enthused is the average listener with the music that he scarcely notices the presence of this little songster which defines the mood of the whole of this Ständchen. The point is that the nightingale’s song represents the sorrow of unhappy love rather than its fulfilment, what Coleridge calls ‘Philomela’s pity-pleading strains’. The interlude after ‘Ach! sie flehen Dich’ seems especially appropriate, the dying fall of the piano’s echoing phrase doing service for an imitation of birdsong at eventide. In musical terms this is all a strophic repeat of what we have heard on the song’s first page, but the new words bring new delight: the jump of a sixth up to the word ‘Töne’ set to a dotted crotchet seems a built-in illustration of tonal beauties per se, whether from the throat of man or bird: the clinging harmonies in thirds at the repeat of ‘kennen Liebesschmerz’ denote the twinned complicity of souls who suffer pain in parallel; and the change into D major at ‘Silbertönen’ is a moment of real magic. The equivalent passage in the first verse (at ‘feindlich Lauschen’) is not special in the same way; surely this is an instance when the composer planned ahead and engineered a colour change with the words of the second strophe in his mind more than the first. This is the sweetest piece of silver ever to have crossed a larynx, and it deserves a palme d’or.

The music is suddenly disrupted with an abrupt change of mood as if the singer’s patience is at an end. He changes tactics by trying something more forceful than seductive charm. These pleas, which have in them something of a command, almost always result in a faster tempo for the following eight bars, a change which is not actually marked by the composer, but which is so time-honoured as to have become traditional, and almost de rigeur. From the point of view of the performer’s amour propre this music is a masterstroke. It was Anna Milder who once wrote to Schubert of his songs that ‘all this endless beauty cannot be sung to the public’ (letter of 8 March 1825). What she meant was that there had to be an element of showmanship to keep the man in the street interested. The closing passage of this song (particularly the forte passage of ‘bebend harr’ ich Dir entgegen’) gives the singer a chance to show his mettle as a tenor worthy of the name. It provides an element of theatricality lacking in very many of the greatest Schubert songs, and the ardent peroration may indeed be a contributing factor to this song’s enduring popularity. Briefly the music enters into the more thrusting regions of a sharp key: launched by the turbulence of the diminished harmonies under ‘Liebchen, höre mich!’ the music clambers on to the impassioned heights of a cadence leading to B minor. For a moment the singer seems on a high, trembling with passionate expectation. The two-bar interlude after ‘Dir entgegen’ (the same rising phrase harmonised first in E minor then in B minor) is, for once, also forte. And then a descent into reality. The juxtaposition of G major for the first ‘Komm’, beglücke mich!’ makes for music that is crestfallen and rueful. The singer rallies for another ‘Komm’, beglücke mich!’, once again forte, where the euphonious thirds between voice and piano seem to be a metaphor for imagined sexual unity. But it is the third appearance of these words where Schubert himself comes back into view and reveals himself as the little man that has loved and lost: the melancholy descent of the final ‘Beglücke mich!’ is spread over three bars, the second and third syllables of this hopeless request taking an entire bar each.

This texture, suddenly bare, allows the strumming guitar staccati to re-establish themselves in our consiousness. We are back where we started, and the beloved is as unattainable as ever. It has in fact been a serenade in vain, a ‘vergebliches Ständchen’ like some of the greatest in the lieder repertoire. A shortened version of the interlude between musical verses 1 and 2 brings the song to a close; there is no play between minor and major here, only the instrumental reduction of the serenade supported by guitar chords gently oscillating in the tonic, subdominant and dominant of D major. But it would be a complacent listener who imagined that this quiet withdrawal in the major key betokened happiness or even calm. The thought of love’s fulfilment is blissful, but the chances of dreams turning into reality are slim. If we have the ears to listen, Schubert can use such sweet harmonies to sadder effect than anyone else.

In Ständchen, the melody is replete with longing, echoed by the piano’s answering phrases. Telling details are momentarily illuminated by a switch from minor to major (for example, at ‘Des Verräters feindlich Lauschen’, suggestive of the gleam of a blade in the twilight) and, as the lover becomes more impassioned, there is a characteristic enharmonic change on the word ‘Bebend’. But the climax at ‘Komm’, beglücke mich!’ is illusory; for all the piano’s ecstatic coupling with the voice, major turns to minor and hope to disillusion.

This E minor song is one of the great favourites of the set, particularly for amateur baritones who enjoy a dramatic outing. The song has attitude; it addresses the world with a portentously glowering gaze. It also has the advantage of very short phrases, and countless singers with little breath control have been able to roar its opening pages with some emotional credibility, if little beauty of tone. Its suitability for any voice in the original key is questionable: too low to lie well for most tenors, it embraces high Gs which most baritones choose to avoid in lieder performance, particularly when soft as in this song’s middle section. Accordingly the lower voices transpose the song into D minor which adds an even darker colour to its inherently doom-laden scenario. Someone who has heard this song often in performance (when it often sounds like an aria from Don Carlos) would be surprised to see how much of it is marked piano. The song rises in its later stages to anguished utterance, but a lot of it is meant to be innig. A tenor voice essaying the original key (as here) is unable to dig deep into the music in the manner of the lower voices.

This is a much faster song than Der Wanderer but the woeful introspection of both works obviously has much in common. It reminds us also of other songs from 1828. The opening words, ‘Rauschender Strom’, should be enough to give us a clue that we may find here some of the musical characteristics of Auf dem Strom and so we do. Of course the surging river is only one of the aspects of nature described in Aufenthalt which is not usually classified as one of Schubert’s water lieder. But the flowing movement of water has inspired the work’s Bewegung, and the two songs share a similar tempo and a similar grandeur; the fourth verse of Auf dem Strom (which mentions tears, as does the second of this song) throbs with a similarly insistent triplet accompaniment, and a similar sense of high drama.

The other song brought to mind by Aufenthalt is Herbst. The shared E minor tonality is an obvious link, but the simple but eloquent left hand which engages in a colloquy with the voice, sometimes with melody, and sometimes through rhythmic imitation, is a feature common to both. In Herbst the piano’s right hand rustles in semiquaver sextuplets; these perform the same harmonic function as the relentless triplets in Aufenthalt. Indeed, the colour of the songs is so alike, both reflecting introspection and deep pessimism, that it seems impossible to imagine a properly varied Schwanengesang (surely one of the glories of the cycle) which includes both songs. Perhaps Schubert’s regarded Herbst as a study for Aufenthalt, which is why the former song disappeared from view for so many years.

We have already spoken of the short bursts of melody separated by rests which are a characteristic of this song. They are a result, of course, of the poem’s tendency to describe different pictures in short dactylic bursts in successive lines (‘Rauschender Strom / Brausender Wald’). The poem is usually printed incorrectly in order to save space in recital programmes, but in this case it is clear that the versification, the look of the poem on the page, has had a great deal to do with the song’s musical shape. From the beginning there is a deliberately engineered conflict between the duplets of the vocal line and the triplets of the accompaniment (the songs of Brahms also rely for much of their expressive strength on this dichotomy). The fight not to be swept away by the river, or by the sadness of events, is inherent in the battle between the two note values. The narrator is sitting tight. As Richard Capell puts it: ‘It is necessary to preserve the squareness of the 2/4 subjects against the unceasing triplets – to maintain one’s foothold, so to say, against the beating wind and rain’. In the prelude the left hand pushes against those right-hand triplets in a fight to be heard, resolutely refusing to be drawn into their rhythm. The voice sings in dotted rhythms which should sound resolute – an instance when quaver+semiquaver dotted rhythm do not equate to the first and last note of a triplet as was often (but clearly not always) the practice in Schubert’s time.

The opening vocal melody is delivered in a succession of short bursts separated by rests but it somehow adds up to a marvellous continuous melody with a wide range and an impressive rhetorical sweep. This poem is extremely pithy, so Schubert freely repeats words and whole phrases in each of the verses. Without this the song would have been over in a flash, and extremely lightweight. The dotted rhythm of the singer is echoed by the piano’s left hand which propels the voice forward to its next utterance. A significant stretch of the music is grounded on an E pedal (within only six bars this encompasses chords of E minor, E major, E7 and second inversions of both A major and minor). All these changes of harmony make the music turbulent, but the use of a pedal point makes it appear simultaneously weighed-down and anchored, an exact analogy for the protagonist’s state of mind, stubbornly inconsolable in the midst of the storm. This is also the source of the stentorian grandeur of the song. The danger here is a pomposity which is untypical of this composer. From this point of view the windswept Herbst seems more typically Schubertian.

The second verse is set to new music which is a superb realisation of stormy waters; the vocal line even looks tidal on the page: ‘Wie sich die Welle’ starts on a low B, jumps to the G sharp the sixth above, recedes to the same B before jumping a seventh like a wave breaking on the shore of the stave. This vocal waxing and waning continues with the music which describes the poet’s tears. The words ‘Fliessen die Tränen / Mir ewig erneut’ are heard no fewer than three times. The second of these is one of the first of the song’s raw outbursts which still sounds surprising and modern today, a wail-like cry from the heart where the word ‘Tränen’ is elongated to three minims accompanied by three bars where unremitting chords of A7 are hammered out mercilessly. This is a harmony that we had not expected to hear so suddenly juxtaposed to the G major of the preceding ‘Fliessen’. Then the bass note of A rises to A sharp, the leading note of B minor, which triggers a shift into that key. The eight-bar interlude is an upper pedal on B with the piano harmonies rising chromatically beneath it. In this rather original way the composer steers us into the third strophe and a new key where this B is the third of the scale.

For the third strophe, new music again. A heartfelt tune, in G major, of the greatest simplicity and nobility, marked piano moreover – hardly an oasis of emotional calm, but music of the greatest dignity and introspection. The doubling of the entire vocal line by the piano’s left hand (so that the melody is also the bass line, something that is very rare in Schubert) is extremely affecting. The narrator’s beating heart is heard in the piano’s incessant right-hand triplets, but the rather etiolated texture brought about by this doubling allows us to glimpse his loneliness, and his sensitivity. Without this window into his soul we might have thought of him as merely a misanthropic brute. As in all the other verses, word repetition expands the size and import of the strophe. The decorative cadence at the end of the verse at the final ‘Herze schlägt’ is the only moment in the entire song when the singer allows himself to be wooed into the triplet rhythm of his accompanist.

The shape of the song now reveals itself as a palindrome. So far we have had three verses and the form has been ABC. The remaining two strophes use music that is already familiar, thus the whole is ABCBA. The fourth verse uses a repeat of the ‘wave’ music; this is effective enough despite the fact that the new imagery of the rock’s age-old ore is less suited to a passage that was so obviously crafted to depict the tidal flux of ‘Welle an Welle’. Finally, the clinching recapitulation of the first verse is not one of Schubert’s own repeats; in this case it is Rellstab himself who brings the poem full circle and thus creates Schubert’s musical shape for him. But there is one more surprise, and a disturbing one. This is for the setting of the second of the phrases with the words ‘starrender Fels’. We hear a sudden juxtaposition of E minor (home key) harmony with no fewer than four fortissimo bars of C minor triplets under this word. Even the most sophisticated of ears, if they had never heard the song, could hardly have expected this brutal switch. The musicologist Richard Kramer sees it as ‘a harmony without antecedent, with no apparent justification’. In seeking for such a justification he sees a reference to the C minor opening of Kriegers Ahnung. Others like Edward Cone see this use of the flattened submediant as typical of other moments in the Rellstab songs. From the expressive point of view an enormous emphasis, almost a talismanic power, has been given to the word ‘Fels’: this rock is more than a sheer cliff-face; surely this is symbolic of a stone blocking the way, the cause of the impasse of the emotions, the boulder the singer has to shoulder like an Atlas. And perhaps his ‘Aufenthalt’ is the end of the road, the place where he discovers that any way further forward is blocked to him. (The English translation ‘resting place’ has perhaps too peaceful and comfortable a connotation.) Little wonder that he allows himself a moment of rage and despair with music that is high, loud and jarring. The final repeat of ‘brausender Wald, mein Aufenthalt’ is far less dramatic (‘starrender Fels’ is omitted, presumably because it would have been impossible to cap the previous outburst on those words) but it allows the voice to rise and fall in a mournful melisma, something of which the ascetic vocal line has so far been rigorously free. This in turn is imitated by the piano’s left hand – and then of course we realise that this is the same music as for the introduction. Not for the first time in a Rellstab song we feel that we have come full circle.

Love is not mentioned in this poem. It is the only one of the Schwanengesang which neither has a female ingredient, nor mentions love. But the very absence of such an element is symptomatic of the mental block with which the singer is confronted. The theory about a cycle of ‘distant beloved’ poems might have been stronger if this character had addressed his plaint to the woman of his dreams. Instead we find someone tormented and out of step with society and then, as now, we suspect that sex may have something to do with it. Perhaps it suited Schubert to include at least one song where the reason for the character’s emotional disorientation remained an open question. The failure of love, after all, takes many forms, as does the persona of the distant beloved.

Aufenthalt returns to the obsessive rhythms and driving triplets of Frühlingssehnsucht, now given more weight in keeping with the impressive landscape it invokes (both the poem and Schubert’s music should be essential items in any exhibition devoted to the concept of ‘the sublime’ that inspired generations of landscape painters). Well known as the song is, there are moments of great harmonic originality, as in the long-held (and unresolved) dominant seventh on ‘Tränen’, and even more dramatically, the enharmonic sidestep at the climactic ‘Starrender Fels’ in the final repeat of the opening stanza. In a sense the song is Der Wanderer in a new landscape and a rawer state of emotional torment.

Woe to those who flee,
who journey forth into the world,
who travel through strange lands,
forgetting their native land,
spurning their mother’s home,
forsaking their friends:
alas, no blessing follows them
on their way!

Here we have a more anguished message to the ‘ferne Geliebte’ than Beethoven would have thought appropriate to send in a song. But times had changed. Between that composer’s cycle (1816) and the Schwanengesang lies Schubert’s Winterreise and a darker Romanticism. The Berliner Rellstab, though hardly the most original of poets, would have been aware of all the latest literary developments. Among these would have been the poetry of Wilhelm Müller which was available in book form in 1824, a year before Rellstab gave these poems to Beethoven. Müller’s winter traveller goes out into the hostile world, embarking on a winter journey as a result of a failed relationship. In the last four lines of In der Ferne the narrator, similarly drawn to a life of distant travel, sends a bitterly gallant message to the girl who has broken his heart. These words might easily have come from the same character who bids his faithless lover goodnight at the beginning of Winterreise.

Would that the poet had been satisfied, however, with a metre and form of expression as direct as Müller’s! Instead we have one of the strangest and most ‘worked’ of all the poems that Schubert set, an exercise in clever literary artifice, and a veritable feast of adjectival present participles and internal rhymes. (Capell, with a disdain for Victorian curlicues, refers to a ‘Swinburnian revel of triple rhymes’.) The effect is both extravagant and contracted – a flowery telegraphese where each thought is curtailed as a result of the verb form which dangles disconsolately at the end of each line. If the poet is too shellshocked to put together a sequence of coherent thoughts, he still seems to have the self-possession to play verbal games reminiscent of Rückert on a bad day. He also distances himself from the circumstances described; only the ‘mir’ in the final strophe gives the game away and informs us he has been describing his own plight. One senses that Rellstab was proud of his virtuosity in rhyming, although the final result, especially when read out loud, walks a thin line between romantic obsession and unintentional comedy (one’s soulful attention begins to falter somewhere around ‘blinkender’ and ‘sinkender’). One wonders whether Schubert would have chosen to set this poetry if it had come his way without the Beethoven connection. And it would have to be a brave composer at the height of his powers who would be prepared to take on such a disjointed series of images in end-stopped lines which do nothing to help the music hang together.

Fortunately the composer was at the height of his powers, and if it is true that he was looking to make an An die ferne Geliebte for modern times, the poem was ideal for his purposes. Like Aufenthalt it achieves a type of majesty which is unique to certain Rellstab songs (one also thinks of Kriegers Ahnung), a grandeur that is both imposing and moving, and yet at the same time somewhat stiff – no, that is an exaggeration; one could express it more accurately by saying ‘at one remove’. This has nothing to do with Schubert’s use of harmony as such; he explores new harmonic regions in a manner of which Beethoven would not have dreamed (certainly in his lieder) and this aspect of the songs is new and startling. But it is as if Schubert is so intent on creating masterful musical constructions, music to impress the shade of Beethoven perhaps, that he is less concerned to fashion his creatures out of flesh and blood. Schubert’s usual flair for dramatic truth is quite different from the quasi-operatic stance of some of these characters. Although they are larger than life in some ways, there is also something theoretical about them, as if archetypes rather than real people. (Is Fidelio, for all its greatness, not an opera of archetypes? Indeed, is this not at the core of its greatness?) This ‘statuary’ style, passionate and imposing at the same time as remote, is not absolutely new for Schubert; we have noticed it earlier in his output, particularly in some of the grander Schiller settings which have also called on a Beethovenian mood and musical vocabulary. For the more epic Rellstab poems one feels that the musical solutions are the result of a controlled experiment, certainly not a sign of Schubert losing his inimitable touch. We only have to remember that Beethoven’s finest songs (and these are many and beautiful) are also very different from Schubert’s at his most typical. The Rellstab poems were originally Beethoven’s texts and, in setting these, Schubert seems to have thought himself into a Beethovenian state of mind.

The dramatic opening of this song is a good illustration of this. The listener’s attention is summoned, in a thoroughly symphonic manner, by an opening on the fifth degree of the scale. Bare unison F sharps are filled out by creeping left-hand semiquavers. These usher in what at first sounds like a plagal cadence in the key of F sharp, but this is soon revealed as the dominant of the home key, B minor. Brandishing the dominant at the listener as an opening gesture is rare in lieder (only Letzte Hoffnung from Winterreise comes to mind in the songs of the mature Schubert) but it is typical of the arresting opening of Beethoven overtures such as Leonore, Coriolan or Egmont (we know that the last two of these were familiar to Schubert). But of course Schubert remains Schubert at his inner core, as does any composer of a stylisation. The choice of key is a sign of this. He has selected a tonality which was his eventual choice for Einsamkeit from Winterreise – a key which, according to John Reed, denotes ‘physical and mental suffering, loneliness, alienation and derangement’ for Schubert. The sombre, brooding mood of an earlier Schubertian outcast in B minor – Der Unglückliche – also comes to mind.

After two bars (the tempo marking is ‘Ziemlich langsam’) this strident introductory F sharp is capped by an even more gloomy G natural which is also filled out after a bar, this time by diminished-seventh harmony. A return to a repeat of the opening bars grounded in F sharp sets the scene in a way that is both dramatic and formal. The time signature is 3/4 and anyone who has attempted to sing this song knows that the ‘Ziemlich langsam’ must refer to a slowish one-in-the-bar tempo, rather than three painfully dragging crotchets – most of the four-bar phrases must be accomplished within a single breath. The vocal line (grounded in or around repeated F sharps in depressive fashion – cf the opening of Der Doppelgänger) is minimalist – or, rather, it seems to be almost spoken. We have to wait to hear the melody as a totality: it emerges over a long span rather than proudly announcing itself in these opening bars. The alternation of tonic and dominant harmonies is a strong feature here, as are the striding octave basses which emphasise the music’s down-at-the-mouth character. There is a fermata (Schubert’s translation of the poet’s solitary use of a hyphen) after the first two lines of the poem; in this way the protagonist seems to enter the stage after the overture, announce himself, and then get on with the rest of the song.

All this might be called old-fashioned were it not for a general mood of suicidal gloom which is hardly Classical. The song seems to cultivate a deliberate monotony, particularly in terms of rhythm. Of course here the composer is the poet’s prisoner, for there is nothing to be done with this metre but to set line after line of music in the same pulse – three crotchet beats followed by dotted crotchet + quaver and another crotchet. Harmony must provide the variety, and the setting of ‘Mutterhaus hassenden’ is a case in point. The change here from B minor to B flat major(!) would have done Berlioz credit. This wrench contains such venom and anger that we would not be surprised if, in setting it, the composer had called on unhappy memories of his own ‘Mutterhaus’, or more particualrly ‘Vaterhaus’. It was the daring of this very progression (as well as its implied anti-family sentiment) which prompted a review in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung which Schubert, of course, was never to read:

If such unseemlinesses, such insolently placed harmonic distortions, could find, in defiance of all commonsense their impudent swindlers, who would foist them as surplus originality upon patient admirers of extravagance, we should, supposing that the egregious thing were to succeed, soon be removed into the most blissful of all states, a state of anarchy similar to that of the days of the Interregnum.

This extraordinary dislocation has a deeper musical purpose, and it is a slide into anarchy of sorts. It is the beginning of a long chromatic descent in the bass between B natural and F sharp in the course of six bars. At ‘Wegen nach’ the left hand reaches the first inversion of D major which opens the doorway into a return to its relative minor, the home key of B. Such a long arch, a tortured progress which moves in steps, albeit with strange harmonic surprises, again brings Berlioz to mind. The extraordinary vocal plunge of a fifth on the second ‘Wegen nach!’ (after holding an F sharp on the first syllable for seven-and-a-half beats) seems better suited to paint the second verse’s ‘sinkender’. This is surely another illustration of how Schubert has learned to plan ahead in the writing of strophic songs.

And this song is strophic, at first completely, and then much modified. The second verse, introduced by an interlude which is a repeat of the Vorspiel, is an exact musical repeat of the first verse. The dislocated harmony which has been so powerful for ‘Mutterhaus hassenden’ is less effective for ‘Busen, der wallende’, but this is a trade-off for the remarkably apt setting of ‘sinkender’ already mentioned. Once again we hear the ominous seven-bar interlude, and by now we must admit to the culminative power of music that seems to grow in stature with each succeeding anguished phrase. This is Schubert the sophisticated symphonic structuralist at work.

The change to the major key, for the first of two complete (and different) settings of the poet’s last verse, comes just in time to cast a ray of redeeming sunlight on this dark tableau. Mention of breezes prompts a lambent murmur of B major right-hand semiquavers against left-hand triplets. (The effect of this accompaniment in the tessitura and tonality of the piano writing of Nacht und Träume is curiously Brahmsian, a meshing of different note values which, while descriptive of both wind and wave, is hardly typical of Schubert’s piano writing with voice. A new, almost impressionist note is struck here.) The vocal line, and even the harmonic movement which supports it, is made up of new material, but it is all cleverly derived from what has gone before. It is evident that a creative hand is seeking to create unity, both within the song and in the Rellstab settings as a whole: the euphonious interaction of descending sixths to be heard between voice and piano at ‘Sonnenstrahl, eilender’ is a feature to be found in a number of the other Rellstab songs, as is the echoing commentary of the piano after ‘die mir mit Schmerze, ach!’, and again after ‘dies treue Herze brach’. (This conversational aspect of the piano writing will achieve even greater importance in the song’s concluding verse.) Of course this ray of happier B major cannot last long; it cedes to B minor for mention of pain and a broken heart, and the strophe seems destined to end in the minor. It is a poignant surprise then that the word ‘ziehenden’ changes from minor back to major in the course of its setting. It is as if the vocal line has been caressed with a consolatory touch. The frequent switches between minor and major here are like the sun appearing, disappearing and then re-appearing from behind a cloud.

It is the presence of natural beauty that is the source of this consolation of course, and now Schubert repeats the words for Rellstab’s third verse to make the composer’s fourth. The tenor voice now comes into his own at last (and the baritone is challenged to an exacting use of mezza voce). After a single bar of gentle oscillations in B major, we hear the same words (‘Lüfte, ihr säuselnden’) this time raised to a higher tessitura and a higher power. The effect of this change of register is magical, and the single bar of piano interlude provides an echo that is other-worldly, largely due to the unusual spacing of the chords in both the pianist’s hands – an almost dissonant rumble in the bass, and eloquent dying fall much higher in the treble. On ‘nirgend verweilender’ there is a sudden change of harmonic direction: the F sharp bass that had seemed to promise a comfortable modulation back to B major creeps up a semitone to F double-sharp and we find ourselves poised firstly on the edge of G sharp minor, and then engulfed by it. This has the effect of a promise broken, something like a betrayal expressed in musical terms, and it announces a coda of tensely varied harmonic exploration. Through one door lies happiness, through another an end to all hope. Once again it is the word ‘ziehenden’ with all its implied movement and capacity for change that is a pivotal point. Its first appearance in this strophe is harmonised by a 6-4 in B major followed by F sharp7. Instead of leading to B major (or minor) this rises to the unlikely but up-beat regions of G major. Oh blessed hope! Through this canal the vocal line breaks out triumphantly into the open seas of C major (the flattened supertonic) with an ecstatically rising scale on ‘Welt hinaus’. But one should expect no permanent happiness from something as ominously named as the flattened supertonic: the second ‘ziehender’ slips back into the home key and the extended cadence that carries it there is mercilessly and grimly elongated. The piano, once it has reached the concluding B minor, simply stays there; its triplets, as if attempting to swamp the voice, are hammered out fortissimo and roll on to a single concluding chord once it has ceased. This is perhaps the most brutal of all Schubert’s postludes, the rejection of the final appeal, the end of the road – as John Reed says ‘a final slamming of the door against the fugitive’.

Woe to those who flee,
Who journey forth into the world!—
Who travel through strange lands,
Forgetting their native land,
Spurning their mother’s home,
Forsaking their friends:
Alas, no blessing follows them
On their way!

Whispering breezes,
Gently ruffled waves,
Darting sunbeams,
Lingering nowhere:
Send her, who broke
My faithful heart with pain—
Greetings from one who is fleeing
And journeying forth into the world!

English: Richard Wigmore

If both Aufenthalt and Frühlingssehnsucht depend on repetitive rhythmic cells in the verse, In der Ferne takes this characteristic of Rellstab to inordinate lengths. On paper, lines like ‘Wehe dem Fliehenden/Welt hinaus ziehenden!’ hardly seem promising for musical setting. Yet Schubert had a remarkable knack of turning poetic eccentricity to musical advantage. Recognizing that the constant harking on the present participle, and the rhythmic monotony it creates, keeps the poem suspended in a kind of grammatical limbo, Schubert creates a limbo of his own. Bare octaves harmonized by sighing appoggiaturas suggest an eerie, desolate landscape, while once the voice enters, the musical rhythm deliberately compounds the verbal, in tolling chords that can never escape their own inexorable tread. It is worth noting that when sung in the original key, the note the singer cannot escape is F sharp, the same that tolls like a bell through Die liebe Farbe in Die schöne Müllerin, where the young miller cannot escape the colour green. In the second part of the song where nature begins to unbend, with triplets and semiquavers depicting the breezes—and the singer’s unfulfilled longing—Schubert makes striking use of the piano descanting above the voice. In the major tonality the effect is especially poignant, while the song’s ultimate return to the minor is devastating.

Farewell, lively, cheerful town, farewell!
Already my horse is happily pawing the ground.
Take now my final,
parting greeting.
I know you have never seen me sad;
nor will you now
as I depart.
Farewell!

Farewell, trees and gardens so green, farewell!
Now I ride along the silver stream;
my song of farewell echoes far and wide.
You have never heard a sad song;
nor shall you do so at parting.
Farewell!

Farewell, charming maidens, farewell!
Why do you look out with roguish, enticing eyes
from houses fragrant with flowers?
I greet you as before, and look back;
but never will I turn my horse back.
Farewell!

Farewell, dear sun, as you go to rest, farewell!
Now the stars twinkle with shimmering gold.
How fond I am of you, little stars in the sky;
though we travel the whole world, far and wide,
everywhere you faithfully escort us.
Farewell!

Farewell, little window gleaming brightly, farewell!
You shine so cosily with your soft light,
and invite us so kindly into the cottage.
Ah, I have ridden past you so often,
and yet today might be the last time.
Farewell!

Farewell, stars, veil yourselves in grey! Farewell!
You numberless stars cannot replace for us
the little window’s dim, fading light;
if I cannot linger here, if I must ride on,
how can you help me,
though you follow me so faithfully?
Farewell, stars, veil yourselves in grey!
Farewell!

This is the last of Schubert’s Abschied lieder, and the merriest. One has to work rather hard at bidding farewell in such an upbeat manner. Saying goodbye, as Schubert’s winter traveller knew only too well, is usually not a happy business: the composer’s own poem for Franz von Schober’s temporary departure from Vienna (Abschied von einem Freunde 1817) prompts a song that is simple and poignant – it is even cast in the desolated key of B minor; Abschied, nach einer Wallfahrtsarie (Mayrhofer, 1816), with its haunting horn-calls, has a soulful spaciousness that reflects the pilgrims’ journey over distant mountains; the recitation Abschied von der Erde (Pratobevera, 1826) is Schubert’s only essay in piano-accompanied melodrama and is a touching valediction spoken on the threshold of death. The contrast between these profound songs and this seemingly uncomplicated Abschied is great. There are of course other happy songs of farewell in the lieder repertoire – Schumann’s Der Knabe mit dem Wunderhorn (Geibel) comes to mind, as well as the same composer’s Wanderlied where the poet Kerner proposes ‘a last glass of sparkling wine’. And of course there is Mahler’s rollicking Scheiden und Meiden from Des Knaben Wunderhorn where the words insist that parting is a sad thing while the music seems both hearty and heartless, a contradiction which gives the song a dark and sinister aspect typical of that composer’s view of folksong.

The Mahler music is at full gallop; one can hear warhorses thundering through the town. This Abschied is not nearly so frantically energetic, but it also features a horse-ride, the last of a number of Schubert songs to do so. The famous Erlkönig was the first, and then there were Wilkommen und Abschied and Auf der Bruck. In each case – ‘Wer reitet so spät?’(Goethe), ‘… geschwind zur Pferde’ (also Goethe), ‘… mein gutes Ross’ (Schulze) – the poet announces an equestrian element at the beginning of the poem, and the composer follows suit with appropriate figurations in the accompaniment to depict the ride. The ‘gutes Ross’ of Auf der Bruck seems (and sounds) a bigger horse than the ‘Rösslein’ of this Abschied, a trusty little pony which paws the ground at the beginning of the poem. But it is his canter which pervades this music, or rather the idea of it. As many commentators have pointed out, it is useless to base a song’s tempo on a calculation of actual physical movement (a walk by a mill-stream will be of no help in gauging the correct speed of Das Wandern from Die schöne Müllerin for example). Many an interpretation of this Abschied has been ruined by too fast a tempo and gabbled words in well-meaning imitation of a steeplechase. One can all too easily ride for a fall in this song, and that also applies to the pianist. The important point-to-point is that the song needs to be elegant and perky, gallant and contained within a ‘mässig’ or moderato tempo from the very beginning. Even at a reasonable tempo its unremitting moto perpetuo takes its toll on various technical aspects of singing, breathing and diction chief among them. I have even known one singer tie himself so tightly in knots that he lost his voice! If the singers tends to hurry we accompanists must jockey for a reasonable speed in rehearsal. It is pointless to lock songs into a stable tempo after the hoarse have bolted.

So closely has Schubert’s music been forged to this poem (like hoof and horseshoe) that few people now take the trouble to read the Rellstab as poetry. Separated from Schubert’s music, there is a note of melancholy in these words, a determination not to be sad at this final parting, but an indication that all is not well in the narrator’s life. Indeed, we might even find echoes here of Winterreise where the winter traveller is also capable of adopting a cheery stance, half in irony and half in an attempt to make the best of a tragic situation. The last verse is particularly revealing in this respect: in addressing the stars who are commanded to ‘veil themselves in grey’ the poet wonders what use they can be to him ‘If I cannot linger here, if I must ride on’. Even the beauty of the numberless stars cannot rival the chink of light in the little window of the beloved’s house. Like Gute Nacht from Winterreise, this is a nocturnal song of farewell, where the compulsion inherent in the words of ‘Darf ich hier nicht weilen, muss hier vorbei’ implies a strong reason for departure. And with that there is the possibility of a sad, even tragic background to the story. If we read between the lines we find, without much difficulty, a scenario which includes a ‘ferne Geliebte’.

Not for the first time in these Rellstab songs we notice that Schubert is less interested in delving deep into such background and the psychology of his characters than in creating a musical shape worthy of important songs which, in turn, are meant to be worthy of Beethoven’s memory. He almost certainly felt that in some of these texts there was a limit to the emotional nuances that could be effectively reflected in music. It is true that he marks the last strophe of Abschied with a new and beautiful harmonic shift (discussed below) and there are felicitous details aplenty where he shows he knows exactly what is going on in the singer’s mind, but his interest in this poem is formal in every sense. This succession of words trips off the tongue – or should do so with any luck. (How one pities the singers who have had to memorise this song, a nightmare ride through confusing musical crossroads and traversing a minefield of text.) But this patter is well suited to the moto perpetuo the composer has planned for his sheerly musical purpose. Schubert wishes to write nothing less (though perhaps a little more) than a lighthearted finale to his ‘symphonic’ song cycle – and what better epilogue could there be than music which jogs and trots into the distance as the horseman makes his adieux.

The key is E flat major, also the key of Beethoven’s piano sonata ‘Les Adieux’, Op 81a, where the sound of the departing stagecoach’s posthorn appears in the opening chords (above them Beethoven writes the word ‘Lebewohl’). Even in Winterreise the mood is momentarily lifted by the sound of the posthorn sounding in merry fashion, and we should not be too surprised that the composer has chosen to mitigate the mood of In der Ferne with something lighter; between these two songs there is the same sequence of keys (B minor to E flat major) as there is between Einsamkeit and Die Post in Winterreise.

And so we begin our journey with a marking of ‘Mässig geschwind’ and an eight-bar prelude where the quavers are marked staccatissimo the better to glint and glance, jump and prance. Sometimes in single notes and sometimes in chords, the right hand ranges across the stave in a manner which stretches most pianist’s sense of keyboard geography to the full. This has all the fun of the fair, more of a plunging and dipping rollercoaster than a safe donkey-ride on the beach. The left hand adds a piquant lift to the chugging motor rhythm – mostly separate quavers marking each beat in different registers, and then suddenly, often on the fourth beat of the bar, a cheeky duplet as if a bump in the otherwise even terrain were negotiated with an added fillip of equine energy. We can almost feel the saddle lifting under us; unlike the foursquare gallop of Auf der Bruck, the sway of the ride, the side-to-side movement of horse and rider, and the relaxed pleasure this denotes, are built into the music.

The voice enters on ‘Ade’, the first of seemingly countless times we hear this word set in almost every possible part of the vocal register. The German ‘Ade’ of folk music is traditionally set to a rising fourth, and thus Schubert gamely begins; but as the song progresses we will hear thirds on this word (mostly minor, both ascending and descending), a sixth (the opening of the second and fourth verses) as well as seconds. The passage describing the horse’s impatience seems ideal: the vocal line rises and falls three times, like a hoof lifting a few inches before it scrapes the ground. The movement of harmony throughout shows Schubert at his most dazzling; we can scarcely keep up with the changes and how meticulously apposite they are for what they describe. The composer makes any number of deft passing excursions from the tonic touching on subdominant and dominant, but keeps bigger shifts for more expressive purposes. Thus the appearance of the relative minor at ‘So kann es auch jetzt nicht beim Abschied geschehn’ is like the obscuring of sunlight by a passing cloud. This seems appropriate for a moment when the singing of a sad song is mooted, even if it is immediately dismissed as impossible. The final line of the strophe is a repeat of the first. This stems from the poet himself who prints the verses’s final line as ‘Ade, du muntre u.s.w.’ (a shortening of ‘und so weiter’ = ‘etc’). Schubert sets this envoi in F minor, a use of the supertonic which wonderfully conveys a sense of distance. We can almost hear the narrator disappear as he rides away. The quick return to E flat major for the last ‘Ade!’ (Schubert’s own addition) has the almost comic dislocation of a Doppler effect.

The second verse is different from the first. After an interlude modelled on the song’s beginning, a nervous quaver twitch in the left hand, like a tiny nudge of the bridle, steers the music into D flat, and thence into A flat major. This is a happy turning off the main highway: the Elysian reaches of the subdominant seem suited to a description of green gardens and silver streams. Various delicious harmonic excursions and diversions return the music to A flat major at the end of the verse. We note the falling interval of this final ‘Ade’ and wonder why this is pitched in reverse, as it were (the answer is in verse 4, a strophic repeat of this one, which bids farewell to the setting sun, something impossible to paint with an ascending interval!).

Verse 3 is a repeat of the music for verse 1; here the charming maidens of the town, flagrant flirts all (if we are to believe ‘mit schelmischen, lockenden Blicken’) are mentioned, surely significantly, in the plural. These ‘freundlichen Mägdlein’ are not the cause of the singer’s departure. We gather in the course of the song that there is one in particular who is the reason for that, and she is not among these flibbertigibbets. In this verse, the little excursion into the relative minor at the end throws a beam of light on the singer’s decision to depart – this is one of the moments when, reading between the lines, we gather that there might have been once a good reason for him to stay in the town. Verse 4 is a repeat of the music for verse 2, and once again the subdominant is explored with appropriate effect. The glint and twinkle of sun and stars is masterfully reflected in the darting Bewegung of the accompaniment, a classic example of Schubert’s ability to contain multitudes of contradictory ideas within the umbrella of one all-purpose piano motif. Here we forget the narrator’s pony for a moment, and see instead the horse-drawn chariot of Apollo as it traverses the sky. But the rhetorical question ‘Und wär’ es denn heute zum lezten mal?’, tinged in C minor, is another half-teasing, half-serious, intimation that this departure is not without its pain and difficulties.

So far the form of the song has been ABABA, but the last strophe is different. Another letter is called for, a C for Coda, even though the section finishes with a return to the constituents of A. No matter how much Schubert wants to write a symphonic finale, a lifelong sensitivity to words makes him create magic for a verse which suddenly marks out the narrator as a poet and fellow-sufferer, not just ‘one of the lads’. E flat major turns into E flat minor and then the relative major of that key, C flat major. The move into this key (it sounds as if it were B major of course) after so much E flat major is indescribably poetic; it is as if we had been spirited to another planet. Here are encapsulated all the ‘might-have-beens’ of the song; the narrator addresses the stars, and in so doing he is allowing himself briefly to dream of another, kinder destiny. At ‘darf ich hier’ he comes down to earth with a new-found determination to leave after all, his temptation to linger peremptorily vanquished. The E flat7 of this chord is not quite ‘home’, but it moves him out of the dream-world and back to A flat minor, and thence to E flat minor. It is at the second ‘hier’ (and with a triumphantly defiant flash of E flat major, but only for two beats) that he embraces the stark reality of the tonic. Then quickly follows the advent of C minor to colour ‘Darf ich hier nicht weilen, muss hier vorbei’. The words ‘Was hilft es, folgt Ihr mir noch so treu’ are revealing: the singer has tried to be so carefree throughout, but his last words as he disappears finally into the distance inform us that something has happened that not even the help of the heavens can redress.

As we have pointed out, it is not as if Schubert completely ignores these nuances. Indeed, he follows the poem’s various contours meticulously. But the composer is not to be deflected from constructing a shape that will give pleasure to the public. We all thank him for this, and admit to listening to this song with tapping foot and smiling eye without giving a second thought to whatever problems the protagonist carries away with him. At the end of the Rellstab cycle we find perhaps the best illustration of the limitations of Schubert’s engagement with this poet. In terms of getting involved with Rellstab’s characters he seems to say ‘so far and no further’. Thus his relationship to the words is ‘at one remove’ despite the fact that he lavishes on them his greatest art.

Mention should be made of another cantering song in E flat major, also set in a beautiful small town, which owes much to this Abschied: this is Hugo Wolf’s Mörike setting Auf einer Wanderung where the similarly staccato accompaniment combines an equestrian rhythm with the hop-skip-and-jump of the narrator’s delighted heart.

Farewell, lively, cheerful town, farewell!
Already my horse is happily pawing the ground.
Take now my final, parting greeting.
I know you have never seen me sad;
Nor will you now as I depart.
Farewell …

Farewell, trees and gardens so green, farewell!
Now I ride along the silver stream;
My song of farewell echoes far and wide.
You have never heard a sad song;
Nor shall you do so at parting.
Farewell …

Farewell, charming maidens, farewell!
Why do you look out with roguish, enticing eyes
From houses fragrant with flowers?
I greet you as before, and look back;
But never will I turn my horse back.
Farewell …

Farewell, dear sun, as you go to rest, farewell!
Now the stars twinkle with shimmering gold.
How fond I am of you, little stars in the sky;
Though we travel the whole world, far and wide,
Everywhere you faithfully escort us.
Farewell …

Farewell, little window gleaming brightly, farewell!
You shine so cosily with your soft light,
And invite us so kindly into the cottage.
Ah, I have ridden past you so often,
And yet today might be the last time.
Farewell …

Farewell, stars, veil yourselves in grey! Farewell!
You numberless stars cannot replace for us
The little window’s dim, fading light;
If I cannot linger here, if I must ride on,
How can you help me, though you follow me so faithfully?
Farewell, stars, veil yourselves in grey! Farewell!

English: Richard Wigmore

After the deeply disturbing In der Ferne (which comes close to bridging the gap between Rellstab and Heine) Abschied provides something in the way of light relief. With its engaging trotting motif in the piano, it is one of the most charming examples of Schubert’s late varied-strophic form. But although ostensibly carefree, with each verse ushered in by a long-drawn out ‘Ade’ and an imaginary wave of the hand, it nevertheless suggests a lover shrugging off disappointment, or at least protecting his heart from too much Sehnsucht. The singer must leave but doesn’t tell us why, and when the harmony clouds for the last and final verse, we could surmise that he is putting a brave face on it.